Congo (88 page)

How to describe a country? Through the jungle of Équateur there walked a man, leading a pig. He was on his way to his village along the Congo River. When he got there he would wait until a boat came by, which happened about once a month. If such a boat came by—they were more like floating villages with a market square, courthouse, and menagerie on board—he would paddle out to it to sell his hefty pink yearling to the crew or to the passengers who hung shouting over the railing. But the river was still far away, two hundred and fifty kilometers (155 miles) from here. He walked through the jungle in solitude, for three whole weeks, sometimes toting his pig, sometimes letting it walk at the end of its rope. At night he slept beside the animal. The river was far away, so terribly far away. And all he had on his feet were flip-flops.
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T
HE TASK
K
ABILA SET OUT TO PERFORM
was anything but simple. Manfully, he dictated: “There will be punctuality, and discipline. I will take up matters again with determination and regain 100 percent control of the situation.”
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The new constitution, in any event, provided a well-thought-out system of checks and balances. Congo was neither presidential nor parliamentarian, but something in between (the head of state did appoint the prime minister, but parliament could taken legal steps against them both in the event of high treason). Congo was neither unitarian nor federalist, but something in between (the provinces were smaller but received more powers and funding). Congo had a new parliament and senate (the former chosen directly, the latter through the provincial councils). And a constitutional court was set up, with extensive powers to settle conflicts between the prime minister and the president. This complex construction was intended to keep too much power from collecting in the hands of one and the same branch of government.

For the parliament and cabinet, there was little danger of that. The house of representatives was highly fragmented: its five hundred members represented no fewer than seventy parties, plus an additional sixty-four one-man parties. The two largest ones, Kabila’s and Bemba’s, held only 175 seats, but even they were internally fragmented. The cabinet was an obese monstrosity with some sixty ministers, not because there was so much to arrange, but because there was so many to mollify. (Later the cabinet team would shrink to forty-five posts, still twice as many as in Lumumba’s cabinet in 1960.) At first, eighty-one-year-old Prime Minister Gizenga received great acclaim, but soon his status proved more antiquarian than alive. One of his ministers was dubbed with the unusual title of
minister près le Premier ministre
. A minister in proximity to the prime minister? In actual practice, the good man was charged with keeping the prime minister awake during meetings.

In late January 2007, after less than two months, a clear indication was seen of the new political culture. The provincial councils had to elect their provincial governors, and the results, to put it mildly, ran contrary to expectations. The PPRD, Kabila’s party, won eight of the nine provinces, even in places where it had not made a dent in the parliamentary elections—Équateur was the only province with a governor owing allegiance to Bemba. The country had been sprinkled generously with bribes: afterward, candidates who failed to be elected even went so far as to publicly demand a refund on their boodle.
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Provincial council members eventually admitted to taking bribes. In Bas-Congo this fraud created so much bad blood that rioting broke out. Few inhabitants felt like having one of Kabila’s flunkies at the head of their glorious province. Bundu-dia-Kongo, a religious-political movement of ethnic bent that had championed the rights of the Bakongo even in Mobutu’s day, called for public protest. The movement dreamed of restoring to its former glory the historic Kongo Empire, which had once reached from Angola to Congo-Brazzaville. During demonstrations at Moanda, Boma, and Matadi, there was massive rioting: ten policemen were killed and the army opened fire on the demonstrators. The final toll: 134 fatalities.

In March 2007 Kabila once again chose the path of violence. As vice president during the 1 + 4 regime, Bemba had had a right to a private militia. Now that he was a mere senator, however, he refused to disband his corps of guards. There was no way, of course, that he could continue to avail himself of a little army of five hundred freebooters. But after the attack on his house in August, he—not without reason—feared for his safety. With his Garde Républicaine, after all, Kabila still had a private army of no less than fifteen thousand troops, an elite corps he had assembled during the transitional period. On March 21, on Boulevard du 30 Juin, the city’s busiest arterial, Kabila’s men opened fire. For three days Kinshasa was in a state of paralysis. Office buildings and embassies had been hit by mortars. Bodies lay scattered about on rotundas. A storage tank for fuel exploded in flames. More than three hundred, perhaps as many as five hundred, were killed. Afterward the presidential services arrested and tortured an additional 125 persons, most of them from Équateur. Dozens were murdered.
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Bemba himself, despite the international warrant out for his arrest, fled to Portugal. He figured that his senatorial immunity would protect him. But in May 2008 he was arrested in Brussels and handed over to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where at the time of this writing he is still awaiting trial.

“There shall be discipline,” Kabila had said. His violent actions in August, January, and March, however, did not bode well. It reminded many of the way Mobutu, immediately after his coup, had four cabinet ministers hanged to underscore his authority. Kabila’s Garde République also reminded people of the former DSP and his intelligence services of those maintained by Mobutu. But was there any substance to that? Perhaps the truth was all much more tragic, much more banal. In all three cases the incidents had followed upon skirmishes that got out of hand and ended inadvertently in a bloodbath. Kabila could hardly admit it of course, but what these incidents were, in fact, was proof that he had no control over his troops, not even his own elite troops, rather than any demonstration of active malice on his part. Mobutu had wanted to show that he was a powerful figure with powerful principles; Kabila had to hide the fact that he was a weak figure surrounded by feeble institutions.

But there was no hiding: soon enough, Kinshasa was buzzing with rumors that Kabila was hooked on cocaine—no, that he spent the whole day playing with his Nintendo—no, that he had been shot and wounded and that was why he showed his face so rarely. People went looking for the wildest explanations for the inefficacy they saw. “Après les élections = avant les elections” (after the elections = before the elections) they mumbled, a sarcastic nod to the situation at independence in 1960. His popularity plummeted, even in the east of the country. Only rarely did one see him smile; rarely did he appear in public. Only now and then did he appear on television: seated at his desk like a stony sphinx, he would read aloud an announcement.

But still, at the start of the Third Republic, a new élan could be noted here and there. The huge, unwieldy parliament voted on fifteen laws during the first ten months of its existence, called sixteen ministers to account, set up eight investigative committees, and discussed a budget. An investigation was started into reported corruption and unlawful mining contracts.
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The new spirit became even more tangible in Lubumbashi, where the public spaces were given an impressive face-lift. The holes in the asphalt were repaired, playgrounds and school were renovated, sixteen hundred garbage containers were placed around the city, and a public sanitation service was set up.
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When I arrived there in June 2007, workers were busy checking and repairing streetlights and pruning trees along the city center’s long, straight streets.

This was, however, invariably the work of a few energetic individuals. That parliament seemed to be getting down to brass tacks was thanks to its dynamic speaker, Vital Kamerhe, one of the president’s confidants who understood the art of concisely paraphrasing interminable debates and leading the way to a decision. Katanga once again showed initiative thanks to Moïse Katumbi, a flamboyant businessman who combined cunning with populism and remaining unconditionally loyal to
le grand chef
in Kinshasa. Kabila needed such dynamic figures to convince the people that his five workplaces were coming along well, but at the same time he made sure their popularity did not exceed his own. New elections, after all, were to be held in 2011. When the widely popular parliamentary speaker Kamerhe openly criticized Kabila’s military operations in the east of the country in January 2009, he was forced to resign and the regime lost one of its more intelligent players. Since that time, Katanagan governor Katumbi has—by his standards—been strikingly quiet. His voluntaristic approach had initially served to illustrate the disadvantages of highly personalized government. In June 2007 I saw that the general hospital at Lubumbashi had recently installed two brand-new coolers in its morgue and acquired a truck for picking up corpses.
Don de Moïse
(donated by Moïse) was painted in huge block letters on the sides of both. Generous, to be sure. But the hospital itself, the country’s second largest, had not had a drop of running water for the last four years.
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Patients going to the toilet had to first wade through a four-centimeter (1.6-inch) thick layer of dreck and piss. I saw it with my own eyes.

The elections cost a ghastly amount of money and generated great expectations, but before long people began concluding that the results had been quite meager. In keeping with age-old custom, the members of parliament bumped up their own monthly salaries—to forty-five hundred dollars in 2007 and then to six thousand dollars in 2008—and bestowed upon themselves and their secretary chairperson shiny new Nissan Patrols: it was one of the few agenda points that met with a little dissent.
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“I don’t get it,” a Kinois told me once. “During the campaign all those candidates looked us straight in the eye, but the first thing they do after being elected is to have themselves driven around in a four-wheel-drive with tinted windows so they don’t have to see us anymore.” As a result, important dossiers like military reform, governmental decentralization, and legal reforms remained untouched, with all the consequences one might imagine.

At the hospital in Lubumbashi I was introduced to Luc, a handsome young man. He was confined to a wheelchair. Nine months earlier he had been arrested one night while trying to steal a roll of electrical wire. In the absence of formal jurisdiction, Congo is marked everywhere by kangaroo courts. The crowd avenged itself on Luc by dousing his hands and feet with gasoline. He watched himself burn. His left foot, his right foot, his left hand. A few months later he went to the toilet and saw his right hand fall off. All he has left now is a thumb. He cannot operate his own wheelchair. And the judicial system is still a farce.

With the cabinet, things went no differently. In October 2008 Kabila replaced soporific Prime Minister Gizenga with Adolphe Muzito, who had previously been his minister of the treasury: a well-behaved, harmless man who has in the meantime done nothing in particular to distinguish himself, beyond accumulating some suspicions of corruption. With a few celebrated exceptions, most of the cabinet ministers proved equally indisposed to action. And why should they act? To display initiative was to risk falling from grace and losing a lucrative post (as happened in late February 2010, when Kabila once again reshuffled his cabinet team and invited twenty new notables to join him at the banquet table). Besides, real policy was established elsewhere, within the president’s own closest circles. In the Third Republic, true power did not rest with the country’s democratic institutions, but with a handful of the president’s most trusted advisers, including his mother and his twin sister. The real policymakers are often those like Augustin Katumba Mwanke, who owes more to his years of loyal service to Kabila than to any charisma or competence. Concerning military affairs, for example, the most powerful man since 2009 has been John Numbi. He is not the defense minister or chief of staff of the national army, but inspector general of police and long one of the president’s favorites. He has had almost no military training.

Bright spots? Yes, a few. Until the international banking crisis in 2008, Congo’s currency had remained relatively stable: one dollar equaled some five hundred Congolese francs at that time, only to fall afterward to nine hundred to a dollar. Year after year the budget grew, but by 2010 it still added up to only $4.9 billion, comparable to the annual means of a medium-sized European city or half that of New York’s Columbia University in the course of a single academic year. Hardly enough to finance the reconstruction of a gigantic country in ruins. What’s more, half that sum is coughed up by international donors: a quarter of it goes to repaying the nation’s debts. GNP rose by a few percentage points annually, due largely to mining activities, but that too is marked by total dependence on foreign capital.
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In 2009 per capita GNP was $200, clearly higher than the $80 seen in 2000, but still a far cry from the $450 of 1960. To arrive at a par with the current level of neighboring Congo-Brazzaville ($4,250 annually, thanks to oil revenues), the population will have to wait until 2040, an internal document from the prime minister’s office said in February 2010. And that will only be achieved if one can assume consistent real growth of 13 percent annually and an unchanged population growth of 3 percent.
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In macroeconomic terms, therefore, slight progress is being seen, but such trends say nothing about the life of the common people. The Human Development Index, calculated by the United Nations each year for every country in the world, provides a much better view of citizens’ welfare than does per capita GNP; the index takes into account such things as the degree of literacy, education, health care, and life expectancy. In 2006 Congo found itself on the tenth lowest spot; in 2009 only five countries had a lower index score. Not a particularly propitious trend.
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